This National Academy of Education (NAEd) report synthesizes findings from scholarship conducted over the past decade as part of a large-scale federal investment by the U.S. Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to improve reading comprehension of U.S. students. To support this undertaking, IES launched the Reading for Understanding Initiative, which invested in six research teams charged with focusing on improving reading comprehension for students in pre-K through grade 12.

This initiative responded to concern that children’s improvement in reading comprehension had leveled off over the previous few decades, coupled with the observation that research on reading comprehension had sufficiently matured to warrant a major investment in leveraging that research to improve student performance.

The Reaping the Rewards of the Reading for Understanding Initiative report, published by NAEd, articulates findings and common themes concerning the nature and development, assessment, and the enactment of curriculum and instruction of reading comprehension. It synthesizes work both within and across the six research teams, reviewing over 200 scholarly articles from this substantial and unprecedented effort to determine what has been learned about understanding and improving reading comprehension.

Additionally, this project includes a paper that is a conceptual review of technology-related reading comprehension research, as well as research related to multimodal meaning-making (both digital and nondigital) and reading comprehension in out-of-school contexts, in order to highlight future directions for reading comprehension research that complement those indicated by the Reading for Understanding teams.